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The ramblings of our marketers...

Every so often we are inspired to put 'type to screen' and share our opinions, thoughts and ideas on marketing-themed topics or conundrums we experience. You will find them all here. If there is something in particular you would like to know about, please just drop us a line.

Why the old ones are the best ones – all rise in favour of AIDA

When I asked the question in the office recently, over 50% knew the right answer, which was pretty impressive given there was not another marketer in sight.

In an industry besieged by jargon and models and theories and principles, I want to prove my point that more people are aware of certain acronyms than we think – or should I say more people know about the BEST acronyms.

Just to clarify for those that don’t know the acronym stands for:

AIDA is one of the most basic but significant marketing models around. Its origin goes back as far as the late 19th Century and was made famous by use in the 1960s as a diagrammatic funnel to show the marketing / sales process.

The reason it’s so important is because it’s a basic formula that when used properly can definitely work. This is what I like. It’s always bringing it back to being simple and then you can be more effective.

It has become a bit of a test model for us and where possible we use it with everything. Whether that’s creating an ad campaign, drafting an e-newsletter, blog or press release, video clips, the list goes on…

Here’s how we use it.

Step 1 – Attention

Is your message going to attract Attention? Does it look attractive? Is the headline stand out? Will it create a reaction, shock people or give them a reason to take notice and leave them wanting more? If not back to the drawing board. If you’ve achieved the awareness then it’s onto gaining Interest.

Step 2 – Interest

So now you’ve captured the attention or made yourself more attractive, the next step is to maintain interest in your product or service to keep people engaged. These days this is the hard part. Creating interest in something is all about giving a reason to do something. So this is back to how you can help them. What is it about your product or service that will heighten the interest enough to take them to the next level.

Step 3 – Desire

Creating desire should be the easy part. We all want things and find reasons to want them even more. But at this stage the job is to show your audience how you can solve their problem. This is the opportunity to bring in the benefits and features of your product or service and how they fulfil the need. Favourites here include; cost and or time savings, before and after examples. Be creative about how you can meet your audiences’need.

Step 4 – Action

This step is effectively to ‘close the deal’. In a personal or one-to-one sales process it would be to ask for the sale. In marketing it’s often to generate an enquiry or lead. But it’s basically the step to get someone to do something. This step is often the most overlooked. We are at pains to make sure we include every bit of information about our business but often forget to tell people HOW they can best get in touch. Phone number, email, landing page, freepost, and a timeline in which to do all of this, there are lots of options to get people to take action.

Hope you find this a useful guideline. Do give them a go and please let us know how you get on.

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